ISAR Signal Tracking and High-Resolution Imaging by Kalman Filtering

In a short observation time, after the range alignment and phase adjustment, the motion of a target can be approximated as a uniform rotation. The radar observing process can be simply described as multiplying an observation matrix on the ISAR image, which can be thought of as a linear system. It is known that the longer observation time is, the higher cross-range resolution is. In order to deal with the conflict between short observation time and high cross-range resolution, we introduce Kalman filtering (KF) into the ISAR imaging and propose a novel method to reconstruct a high-resolution image with short time observed data. As KF has excellent reconstruction performance, it leads to a good application in ISAR image reconstruction. At each observation aperture, the reconstructed image denotes the state vector in KF at the aperture time. It is corrected by a two-step KF process: prediction and update. As iteration continues, the state vector is gradually corrected to a well-focused high-resolution image. Thus, the proposed method can obtain a high-resolution image in a short observation time. Both simulated and real data are applied to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.